Tag: WND

WND column

Bailing Out Obama

“At the White House and in talks in congressional offices and corridors, most of the attention was focused on finding a way to define the precise conditions under which the president could get a second increase in the debt limit that would be needed early in 2012 under both Republican and Democratic proposals.”
– “Amid New Talks, Some Optimism on Debt Crisis,” The New York Times, July 30, 2011

It’s not hard to understand why the leaders of both political parties are vehemently opposed to the possibility of U.S. default. But as many commentators, including myself, have pointed out for weeks, a failure to raise the debt ceiling has absolutely nothing to do with the possibility of a sovereign U.S. default! In fact, raising the debt ceiling will make a default much more likely in the future. So why are the politicians, particularly Barack Obama, so desperate to see some sort of deal struck that will permit the raising of the $14.3 trillion federal debt ceiling?

NB – This column was written prior to the announcement of the “compromise” plan, which Karl Denninger summarized as below. Nothing in it changes anything substantive regarding the column.

1. Lie once again about “cutting spending.” It does no such thing. It increases spending – every year. Bogus and outright-fraudulent “baseline budgeting” means that if they intended to boost spending $300 billion but only increase it $200, that’s a $100 billion “cut.” If you ran your household like this you’d be broke in a week. For the US, it will take a bit longer.

2. No tax increases. That’s nice, but let’s not forget that while the Democrats scream about the “Bush Tax Cuts” the FICA tax cut was theirs. Obama signed it. You cannot keep reducing income and increasing spending forever.

3. The cuts, fraudulent though they are, aren’t even real anyway – and not binding either. There’s nothing before 2013, which means a downgrade is almost certain. Further, raising the debt ceiling now for the whole among but allegedly finding the “cuts” over 10 years is an outright fraud by a ratio of 10:1.

4. A 2013 timeline for actual changes means nothing, since the next Congress is not bound by what this one does. Period.

5. Sequesterization didn’t work in 1997. It won’t work in 2011 either.

6. We failed to get to $4 trillion. That’s what S&P said they needed, and they said they needed to see that within the next three years. Now we find out if S&P has any balls.

NRO reports: “According to sources, Boehner said the deal was “the best that we could get.”” And that is perhaps the most shameful thing about this whole bipartisan charade. The scriptwriters couldn’t even bother to write new dialogue for Republicans Cave on the Budget XXXI.

WND column

The Death of Diversity

Throughout history, nations have taken violent exception to being invaded by large masses of foreigners. The Canaanites did not take kindly to Israelite immigration into the Promised Land, nor did the Israelites later welcome the arrival of Philistine immigrants from the Aegean Sea. The Arabs, who immigrated to Palestine in the centuries that followed Hadrian’s destruction of Judea after the Third Jewish War, are still actively resisting the return of the Jews to their ancient ancestral lands 63 years after the Israeli war of independence.

In Spain, the Reconquista took 770 years, from King Pelagius’ defeat of the Umayyad Caliphate at the Battle of Covadinga in 722 to the last European sultan’s capitulation to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492.

People value their cultures, their traditions, their religion, their land and their blood. They always have and they always will.

WND column

The Third Bush

The president, who has at times been known as Barack Obama, is clearly in trouble. No president except FDR has ever been re-elected with an unemployment rate higher than 9 percent. The erstwhile Barry Soetoro was an anti-war candidate who currently presides over no less than six foreign wars (three of them of his making), he has betrayed practically every campaign promise he made while running for president and he has apparently never met a Goldman Sachs executive he didn’t want to nominate to his cabinet. The only surprise about his low approval ratings, 42 percent according to Gallup and -15 as per Rasmussen’s Presidential Approval Index, is that they aren’t even worse.

It is clear that a Republican candidate should have little problem beating Obama in the 2012 presidential election, assuming he even decides to run for re-election. (I have been skeptical of the assumption that Obama would even be on the 2012 ballot since July 2010.) Gallup has the generic “Republican candidate” leading Obama by an 8 percent margin, 47 to 39. Unfortunately for the Republican Party, they cannot put forward a generic candidate, but must select a specific one.

WND column

The Rise of the East

Supporters of the ongoing Bush-Obama wars have often said that one of the reasons the United States needed to attack Afghanistan and Iraq (and now Libya and Yemen and Somalia) is because failing to do so would exhibit weakness and encourage our enemies. Now that the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan is into its 10th year, intrepid supporters of American empire are claiming that American troops must continue to occupy Afghanistan (and Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Somalia) because the post-withdrawal collapse of the indigenous forces presently being propped up by the U.S. military will exhibit weakness and encourage our enemies.

These childish arguments reveal that the bellicose neocons who have been pushing foreign military adventures for more than a decade are not only chickenhawks innocent of any military service, but also know nothing about military history or the military aspects of geostrategy.

WND Column

9/11 is now a joke

Although a few cynical observers anticipated that Barack Obama, the erstwhile peace candidate, would not end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – remember, he beat out Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination largely on the grounds of her pro-war positions – no one was cynical enough to foresee that his occupation of the presidency would lead to the U.S. military fighting no less than six wars in its third year under his command.

Republicans who have resolutely supported the ongoing wars of democratic imperialism over the last 10 years are long overdue to answer some very serious questions about the strategic sanity of America’s continuous military aggression, particularly now that American troops have returned to the site of their last military defeat in Somalia.

WND column

Republicans and Demon Debt

Are they completely incompetent, or are they merely Democrats in disguise? That is the question one is forced to ask of Republican politicians on a depressingly regular basis. I tend to incline toward the latter position, since I see the two “parties” as being rival factions of the same bipartisan ruling party, but every now and then, there is evidence that points to the distinct possibility that Republicans are simply stupid. Consider this excerpt that the Fraters Libertas quoted from “Decision Points,” George W. Bush’s book about his presidency.

I adjourned the meeting and walked across the hallway to the Oval Office. Josh Bolten, Counselor Ed Gillespie, and Dana Perion, my talented and effective press secretary, followed me in. Ben’s historical comparison was still echoing in my mind.

“If we’re really looking at another Great Depression,” I said, “you can be damn sure I’m going to be Roosevelt, not Hoover.”

One would have thought – one would have hoped – that both the president of the United States and the chairman of the Federal Reserve would know that Herbert Hoover was not the laissez-faire “liquidationist” that the historically illiterate (or at least those who have heard of him) usually believe the 31st president to have been.

WND column

In defense of libertarians

I am always intrigued when conservatives, many of whom genuinely believe themselves to be devoted to human liberty, make a point of attacking its most principled and consistent advocates. So, it was amusing to read the anti-libertarian arguments recently presented by Ann Coulter, whom I rather like and whose work I have praised in the past.

But even the finest minds are capable of making mistakes from time to time, and in such cases, who is better suited to provide correction than a fellow WND commentator and “prominent Christian libertarian”? While I can’t speak for Ron Paul or any other libertarian but myself, it should not be difficult to point out where this illustrious pillar of the Republican media establishment has gone awry in her attack on libertarianism.

WND column

Free Trade Harms America

One of the more onerous aspects of being a superintelligence is the way in which many critics have a tendency to erroneously assume one is operating at the same level of near ignorance that they are. In response to the inaugural Voxic Shock podcast, in which I interviewed economist Ian Fletcher about his book, “Free Trade Doesn’t Work,” a number of free-trade champions actually attempted to appeal to David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, which utilizes an example of trade between two countries in two products to argue that trade is intrinsically beneficial to a national economy.

I am never sure whether to be more amused or insulted when I am met with a critical response of this kind. Possessing a B.S. in economics, having published a book on economics and the current economic depression and being one of the millions of college-educated Americans who have passed an Econ 101 class, I am, as it happens, familiar with the theory. Furthermore, I have actually read Ricardo’s 1817 book, “On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation,” which contains the theory and what passes for the reasoning behind it. This does not appear to be the case with most of the free-trade enthusiasts who appeal to it.

Note to the column: This column contains the promised empirical evidence that Felix was demanding. On a related note, if you have not yet heard my interview with Ian Fletcher on the subject of international trade, it is on the Voxic Shock #1 podcast. And further to the subject, a critique of Hazlitt’s chapter 11 will be posted tomorrow.

Readership and other trivialities

Being an armchair economist, I often find it interesting to look beyond the obvious numbers given the way they are so often misleading. For example, a few years ago, I used to be the third most-read WND columnist behind Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan. Ann was head-and-torso beyond everyone else, and while I occasionally gave Pat a run for his money, his readership was usually ahead of mine by a decent margin. It’s been a while since I last looked into the matter, and since I no longer have direct access to their servers – I prefer to email my columns in so I didn’t bother to ask for it after one of the occasional structural reconfigurations – I began by looking at the Facebook Likes that are now attached to each column.

Unsurprisingly, by this metric, Ann Coulter is still the queen of WND. Here are the Likes for her last four columns compared to a few other selected writers, in order of average Likes.

232.0: Ann Coulter (253, 75, 243, 357)
75.5: Chuck Norris (39, 169, 60, 34)
41.5: Vox Day (60, 40, 40, 26)
35.0: Thomas Sowell (34, 36, 52, 18)
22.0: Ilana Mercer (15, 11, 56, 6)
13.5: John Stossel (19, 5, 19, 11)
10.0: Chrissy Satterfield (29, 11, 0, 0)
9.8: Pat Buchanan (18, 9, 1, 11)

From this, one would quite reasonably conclude that Ann’s columns are much more read than anyone else’s, something on the order of five times more than mine. Chuck’s average is high, but it’s bumped up significantly by one outlier of a column entitled “The Self-Destructing Republican Party”, which went over extremely well with Republicans terrified that their leadership is going to blow their opportunity to knock off Obama. In looking at the actual readers of those same columns for Buchanan, Coulter, and Day – which I requested and cannot directly divulge, but suffice it to say they are in excess of my blog numbers – my WND readership is now 60.7 percent of Miss Coulter’s, which is up more than 10 percentage points from several years ago if I recall correctly.

What I found both interesting and slightly depressing is the fact that Chatterfield’s columns are now more liked, on average, than Pat Buchanan’s. This tends to suggest that WND readers have become more partisan and less partial to intellectual weight as their numbers have grown. While Mr. Buchanan’s readership numbers have not actually declined over time, they have declined in a relative manner as my WND readership is now 122.9 percent larger than his. Of course, it must be kept in mind that although his columns were available elsewhere before, it is entirely possible that many of his biggest fans do not read him at WND, but prefer to read him at The American Conservative instead.

It’s also worth noting that the difference in the size of the Like gap and the readership gap between Coulter and myself tends to indicate that while many WND readers are willing to read my column, they don’t like them all that much. Which makes an amount of sense, given that WND’s conservative Republican readership are likely to hold opinions that are more in line with hers than with my radical libertarian iconoclasm.

Regardless, because I am unwilling to cede primacy of position to Miss Coulter, however much she merits it, (or however little she values it), I intend to resort to cheatingnew tactics. Now, I like to think that I am unusually good at interviews because I am apparently one of the very few interviewers who makes a habit of a) reading the book or the relevant information beforehand and b) letting the interviewee talk as much as he likes in answer to my questions. However, I have done very few interviews in the last year because it is a tedious and lengthy task to transcribe them.

The solution being entirely obvious, I’m pleased to say there will soon be a second weekly Vox Day contribution appearing on WorldNetDaily. The initial subjects will include economist Ian Fletcher, Karl Denninger of the Market Ticker, and the eminent historian John Julius Norwich, among others. I am also in the process of putting together a Joel Rosenberg retrospective which will feature several notable science fiction and fantasy authors.

WND column

This is No Double Dip

One reason I prefer economics to finance is that timing has never been my strongpoint. I thought the tech bubble was going to pop in 1998. I wrote a column in 2002 that commented on the expansion of the housing bubble and noted that this was likely to have a negative effect on the global financial system, but never imagined that the bubble could go on as long as it did or that real-estate prices would rise to such elevated levels. So, given this track record of prematurity, it should be no surprise that it has taken longer for the economic consensus to recognize that the global economy is caught up in a very large economic contraction than I anticipated.

But it is coming, nevertheless. Consider the following two headlines from last week:

“‘WE ARE ON THE VERGE OF A GREAT, GREAT DEPRESSION'”
– Drudge Report, June 1, 2011

“U.S. house price fall ‘beats Great Depression slide'”
– The Independent, June 1, 2011